The MTV Music Generator is a simulator for making custom music tracks on your PC. Developed by Jester Interactive and published by The Codemasters Software Company, this mouse-compatible music generator allows you to create and save music tracks with special sound effects like chorus, tempo and reverb for infinite possibilities.

Along with the option to add various video clips using 3D graphics, the MTV Music Generator includes 1,500 riffs and 3,000 instrument sounds that will fit anyone's taste. From rock and techno to pop and jazz, or drum and bass to house and rap, creating your very own song mixes for your friends is only the beginning.

With the added bonus of music entitlements you'll receive a world-wide royalty-free license to make, use, publish and distribute any works created using the Generator, except for in any commercial music or video creation product. This also includes any other audio and video components provided that all works of such are clearly labeled on the media or packaging with the MTV Music Generator logo, as well as a mailing of intended use to Codemasters.

If it seems too daunting at first, the disc comes with several templates and diverse demo songs written by various musicians, allowing you to edit, remix and examine the tracks. Each song contains a video accompanying it that also allows for editing. Even riffs can be edited with multiple channels to suit your style, from storing them as palettes to muting, splitting or resizing and cloning your riffs. As well, the drum beats, sound effects, strings, percussion and vocals can have their volume increased or decreased, or their tempos and pitches changed to your liking.

Every sampled musical instrument is stored in the Riffs Library, which can be accessed with the touch of a button. The Chase Library gives you a large number of shapes and backgrounds to add to your video clips from the Video Library. The Timeline adds additional steps to your current video chase with transitions per individual element. If it's easier, you might want to let the CPU auto-generate one for you. Jam sessions can be saved to a memory card with up to 15 blocks. And the Jukebox mode sets a list of songs and videos to play which is useful for demonstrations or parties.

Graphics & Sound:

There are basically two different types of graphics involved in MTV Music Generator. The Interfaces and the Music Videos. The Interfaces are somewhat utilitarian when actually making a piece of music, but are more whimsical for the Multiplayer Music Jam sessions. In either case, the interfaces are fairly straight forward. The music creation menus are a slight departure from customary Windows menus, but make enough sense to be easy to pick up on. The Music Jam interface is all game, splitting the keyboard up among up to four players... or allowing for a much less cramped internet play. The second type of graphics to be found in MTV Music Generator is the computer generated music videos. Using cues in the music, MTV Music Generator can create amazingly beautiful light shows, reminiscent of Cthugha, or early completely computer generated music videos.

As for the sound, there are some good examples included with the program, but beyond that, the quality of the music is completely dependent upon your skill. You can play around with the sounds and the pretty colors, watch auto-generated videos for your audio cds, create original music, or make a remix of your favorite artists' songs. The high performance software is in there. It's up to you to learn how to use it. (Oh, and it's also up to you to contact and secure permission to use any audio clips from their respective copyright owners.)

Gameplay:

The most interactive game-like part of MTV Music Generator would have to be the multiplayer Music Jam mode. Even this mode doesn't have any scoring system. It's merely a way for you to jam with a few friends, in your room or across the country. The light show aspects of Music Generator are cool, to be sure, but are merely eye-candy. The most valuable part of Music Generator is it's sequencing abilities. It is basically a music sequencer built for fun. Music Generator makes playing around with samples easy to do, creating riffs a simple task, and even comes with a fairly large library of different riffs covering everything from vocals (samples) to drum beats, to rhythm, melodies... even sound effects. You can create a pretty decent song with the ingredients that come in the box, or you can use a microphone, .wav format samples on your computer, samples from cds, midi instruments (not included... duh), along with a host of easy to use software tools to refine these, and create a new song with nothing but original sounds.

Difficulty:

Learning to use MTV Music Generator is not a very difficult task. Making wonderful music that everyone will fall all over themselves to get their hands on is not as easy. Simply enjoying the pretty colors of the automated music videos accompanying your favorite music is pretty much mindless. In other words, MTV Music Generator has something for everyone. The results can be a few good laughs with a few good friends, or some truly amazing audio tracks that could very realistically make it onto a (local college) radio station, and possibly help launch your new alias as "DJ Fill-in-the-Blank." Or not. It takes little to get into it, and can make some pretty good results if you play with it enough. At any rate, without a scoring system, who jams the best is a matter of your opinion versus theirs.

Game Mechanics:

MTV Music Generator is not really even a game. If it is, it's one of those 'non-competitive' games in which no one loses. What Music Generator is (fer sure) is a cool, fun utility for creating music and playing around with graphics and sound. If you're familiar with the critically acclaimed PlayStation version of MTV Music Generator, imagine the same thing, without the memory limitations, with added 3D accelerator support, and a lot more input options, including the use of midi instruments/devices and LAN/internet play capabilities. They haven't made any blunders in making the PC version, so it's essentially a winner (like the PSX version), with a lot of extra goodness on top. A must have for music enthusiasts of all levels.